A graphical history of apple.com

An enterprising computer historian has taken snapshots of Apple's web page …

An avid Apple fan who calls himself Kernel Panic has set up a unique collection of photos on Flickr.com. The photos showcase all the major changes to the Apple.com front page over the years. From its humble beginning in 1996, when the site was merely a single "Under Construction" page, to 2005, where the site contains over 126,000 pages, every major change is detailed.

Most of the screen shots were taken from using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and have been arranged in a slide show in chronological order. There are two additional non-Apple pages included: both snapshots of www.next.com before and after the merger with Apple was announced.

The first live page, dated 1997, had a simplistic vertical red navigation bar and announced "Apple's New Hard-Hitting Ad Campaign," as well as featuring an interview with charismatic wunderkind Gil Amelio, shortly before a triumphant returning Steve Jobs threw him to the wolves. Later that year, Apple's web page was hacked for a couple of hours, but someone managed to preserve the damage for posterity.

The visual evolution of the site is immediately obvious. The basic format, with the menu bar on top, a large picture underneath, followed by a "Hot News Headlines" bar and pictures of new Apple products, was set by May 1998, with the introduction of the original blue-green iMac. However, the use of overly large, tightly-kerned Garamond for headlines was gradually phased out in favor of smaller serif fonts, and by 2002 these had largely been replaced by a standardized sans-serif font.

The first iPod was splashed all over the front page in 2001, and since then, out of 111 different front page designs, 21 have featured the iPod, iTunes or the iTunes Music Store. The faces of the "Switcher" campaign dominated the site in 2002, although switcher legend Ellen Feiss was noticeably absent. In 2005, a barrage of different screens announced the new features in OSX 10.4, also known as Tiger.

Overall, the pictures are a fascinating visual look back through Apple history. Like all Flickr collections, each picture allows the addition of user comments, and reading through the comments adds an additional historical element to the set, as people recall strange and wonderful Apple products from days gone by.